Pushing Up Daisies

CHAPTER 52

O’Malley and I sat opposite each other in the emergency room at the Springfield Hospital, holding ice packs to our faces. He massaged his jaw. “Not a bad punch.”

“You’re supposed to pivot that back foot and twist your hips,” I said, my cheek full of cotton wadding. “Ellen’s boxing class at the sports club.”

A doctor approached us. “Mr. Stapley is in stable condition. It looked worse, because of all the blood,” she said. “I told the other officers no questions, but he seems to be rambling on his own.” Mike leaped up and jogged down the hall to Richard’s room.

“How are you feeling?” She gently turned my face to the side to inspect my stitches. “You’ll have a respectable shiner but no scars on the chin. I’m a good seamstress. He got the worst of the deal. Good for you.”

The emergency room’s swinging doors flew open.

“Would it be heartless of me to ask you for an exclusive?” Jon Chappell called, rushing toward me.

“I’m fine, thank you for asking,” I said. “Go ahead, ask your questions. The public has a right to know.”

He got out his pad and tape recorder. “Shoot.”

“Richard Stapley killed Yoly Rivera.”

Jon let out a long, low whistle.

“He killed Guido, too.”

“He was the rich man with the accent that Yoly wrote to her mother about?” Jon asked.

“Yup.”

When O’Malley returned, he helped me flesh out the story. “One night in the summer of 1974, after an athletic evening at Dina Fifield’s, Guido was peeing in the hemlocks that separated the two properties and saw Stapley. Stapley claimed he was working on the stone wall, but Guido spotted Yoly’s shoulder bag hanging on the nose of one of the stone dogs. Then he saw her feet, poking out from behind the stone wall.”

“Richard told me Yoly was pregnant,” I said, “just like her mother suspected.”

Mike nodded. “He’s claiming he panicked and Yoly’s death was an accident.”

“Yoly accidentally fell and hit her head on a heavy rectangular object… six times?” Jon asked, citing the autopsy report. “If that’s true, why not just go to the cops?”

“A good citizen; just the thing we in law enforcement like to see. Guido wasn’t. He helped him hide the body.”

“Did Richard tell you how they met?” I asked, refolding my melting ice pack.

“Yoly was hired by the Fifields’ regular house -keeper,” Mike said, “to help at Win’s graduation party. Dina Fifield probably didn’t even know she was there, but Stapley certainly did.”

Chappell was writing furiously.

“Care to continue, Ms. Holliday?”

“Richard thought he’d get away with murdering a poor Mexican no one knew and no one would miss. Guido must have convinced him a marble fountain was a better hiding place than a stacked stone wall. They buried her, and Guido has been blackmailing Richard ever since-not about Margery’s baby, about Yoly’s murder.”

“I told you he was a bastard,” Jon said.

“Once Richard became a pillar of the community, Guido began to really squeeze him,” Mike said.

“Maybe that sewer deal was part of it, the one that tripled the value of Guido’s property,” Jon added.

“But that was two years ago,” I said, “and only pays off when you sell. What if Guido wanted his money now?”

Mike continued, “Richard was desperate. He’d run out of his own money, and although Margery’s was tantalizingly close, he couldn’t touch it. Guido promised Richard he’d leave the country after he got one last payoff, but Stapley was broke.”

“What about his art collection?” Jon asked. “I heard he had a Childe Hassam.”

“Not him, her,“ I said. “Margery says she doesn’t like the new frame, but I bet it’s the painting she doesn’t like, ten to one it’s a fake. I bet Richard sold the original on that trip to Hartford.” Things were coming together.

“So, Stapley tells Guido to be patient, he needs time to raise the money. Two or three weeks tops, then they can meet at their regular drop- off spot,” Mike adds. “The recycling center. Another of Guido’s little jokes.

“In the meantime, you and Neil accidentally tell Guido about the journal. Now he claims to have two things on Richard and gets even greedier. At the meeting they argue, Guido demanding more money and storming off until Richard promises to deliver. Now Richard knows that Guido will never leave him alone. There’ll always be one last payoff. He knows there’s only one way out.”

“Guido interfered with his plans,” I explained. “Richard parked the black Lincoln conspicuously in front of Halcyon so that I or anyone passing would assume he was there. Then he called the nursery, probably from a pay phone, to make sure the afternoon help had arrived and Guido would be alone in the trailer. That was Tanya’s hang- up, right?” I asked Mike.

“Keep going, you’re doing pretty good.”

“Richard bicycled to the nursery, stabbed Guido, then rode back to Halcyon, stashing his bike and poncho in the maze. Somewhere along the way, maybe in the deep gravel at the nursery, he bent one of the rims, but that didn’t matter. He’d be driving back in the car.”

“The tracks at Guido’s nursery we initially thought were made by a wheelbarrow were made by a specialized bike,” Mike said. “Same make and model as Richard’s.

“Why didn’t he go back for the bike sooner?”

“He probably tried, but someone was always there. He told Margery it was in the shop anyway; and, given his track record, he probably thought he could leave it stashed in the garden for years and no one would notice. Sorry, Mike.”

“What about the weapon?” Jon asked.

“Richard unwittingly returned one of Guido’s own tools,” Mike said. “He took the coa from Halcyon’s green house and peeled off the orange tape Paula had used to identify the tools, assuming correctly that the handle would be covered with other people’s fingerprints. Hugo’s just happened to be a set we were able to identify. What Richard didn’t count on was our criminalist’s finding microscopic traces of cashmere stuck to the adhesive residue on the handle. Not too many garden workers wear cashmere gloves. All circumstantial until you forced his hand and he tried to kill you.”

“And, not to be too grisly,” I added, “anyone who knew how to use a coa wouldn’t have missed Guido’s heart. The curved blade enters much lower than you’d think unless you’ve used it enough times to get the hang of it.”

“So, Sergeant O’Malley, how did you happen to be at Halcyon at just the right time?” Jon asked.

“Fraser called me.” Mike turned to me. “You might eliminate the middleman next time. He learned a painting from the Hassam series was sold to a private collector in Hartford three weeks ago by a man claiming to be Benjamin Russell, who happens to have died in 1984. We’d been watching Richard anyway since the day we brought all of you in for questioning. Your alibi for him wasn’t exactly airtight. That’s the reason I went to the Stapley home in the first place.

“When we found Hugo’s prints we had to hold him, and it let Richard think he was in the clear. But you pushed his hand; he got careless. As Paula has so tactfully pointed out, given the police department’s history, and his, he probably thought we’d take another thirty years to figure it out,” Mike said.

“Any thoughts on the famous missing journal?” Jon asked. “Or is that Springfield’s newest mystery?”

“That’s what Stapley was looking for the night he sideswiped you at the recycling center.”

“That was him?” I was shocked, but it didn’t take me long to fill in the blank. “When he didn’t find the journal in Guido’s office, he waited until he thought it was safe, then borrowed one of Guido’s own trucks to search for it in their usual hiding place.”

“A plus. їQuiйn sabe?” Mike said. “Maybe the journal never even existed.”

“And the candy?” Jon asked.

“Purely an accident. Must have fallen out of Re-nata’s pocket without her even knowing.”

“All right, I’ve got enough here to keep me busy for a month.” He checked his watch. “If I write this up in the next hour, it can make tomorrow’s paper.”

O’Malley and I watched him fly down the hall.

“їQuiйn sabe?” Mike said. “Is that what you really think about the journal?”

“No. Now that the press is gone, I’ll tell you. I think Hillary Gibson took it that very first day at Halcyon, tucked it under her shawl the whole time she was talking to me. I don’t know what’s in it, and I don’t need to know. It’s none of my business.”

“And gardening is a dirty business,” he said.

“You know, that’s a much better name for my company-Dirty Business.”